The World Hockey Summit will boil down to 2014 Olympic participation, and won't produce a 'yes' or 'no' from the NHL

In concept form, the World Hockey Summit, which takes place from Monday to Wednesday in Toronto, is a fantastic idea. The NHL, IIHF, USA Hockey, Hockey Canada, the Canadian Hockey League (major junior hockey), NCAA, AHL, KHL, you name the men's or women's hockey league that's any sort of player on the hockey scene, and they're sending their top people to Toronto to discuss everything from the Olympics to the Stanley Cup, World Championships, developmental models, costs of participation, in theory, anyway, everything's on the table and putting everybody in the same room means the kinds of issues that get left out are specifically on the table and on the agenda.

Agenda is the key word, however, when it comes to bringing the game's power-brokers together in a semi-public forum (the public's invited if you can cough up $495 for "registration") in late August, and as the Globe and Mail has cranked up its pre-summit talking-point articles, they've come to the bottom line--money. For the IIHF, the Olympics are an every-four-years cash cow of immense proportions, but in the interim, the first "I" in IIHF is in name only because its main constituents, the European hockey federations, make a mint off of the men's World Championships.

Those championships just happen to conflict with the Stanley Cup playoffs in the NHL and just about every North American professional hockey league's championship (the developmental leagues' seasons mirror the European leagues' schedules more closely), thus the infamous and apologized-for article by IIHF director of communications Simon Szemberg, who suggested that Sidney Crosby (to whom the IIHF apologized at the behest of Hockey Canada) and Red Wings forwards Henrik Zetterberg, Tomas Holmstrom, Johan Franzen and defenseman Niklas Kronwall (who received no "oops, sorry") had no right to decline participation in the Worlds because of injuries or fatigue, going so far as to compare them to Ukrainian miners and single mothers--seriously.

And that in a nutshell, is the issue here. Not deferring the costs of player participation in hockey at every level from mites to beer leagues, nor encouraging the growth of women's hockey outside the NCAA and Olympic programs in the U.S., the contentious relationship between competing developmental and professional leagues--and there's no doubt that NHL commissioner Gary Bettman and IIHF president Rene "The Dentist" Fasel have nothing on the portfolio SKA St. Petersburg GM/president, KHL president and one director-general of Gazprom-Export, the largest natural gas exporter in the world, Alexander Medvedev--it's going to boil down to an NHL versus IIHF battle.

There's no doubt that for certain partners in the game, and women's hockey, specifically, some of the discussions that will take place in Toronto may very well decide the sport's future internationally, but as far as men's hockey at the professional level goes, it's all about the Olympics, World Championships and potential return of the World Cup because in hockey, like in life, the most weight's given to the issues that involve the most money and power...

And, as the Globe and Mail's David Shoalts points out, it's highly unlikely that the NHL or IIHF will come out of next week's meetings with any sort of Olympic consensus?

Why?

Because the NHL believes that any Olympics that doesn't take place in North American prime time, especially after the injury-plagued disaster that was the 2006 Olympics in Turin, places its players in harm's way for no financial gain, because it's a collective bargaining issue...

August 21, Globe and Mail: IIHF president René Fasel appears to have no stomach
for twisting Bettman's arm. He seems more interested in kissing up than
in pushing him to do the right thing.

The NHL can brag all it
wants about sending six teams to Europe in October to play some
preseason games and open the 2010-11 regular season. But playing a few
exhibitions (even if a few are disguised as regular-season games) cannot
compare to the Olympics when it comes to selling your sport in the long
run. This is going to be a collective-bargaining issue in a
couple of years, not something that will be settled in an off-season
chinwag. Both management and labour have to sign off on Olympic
participation.

Bettman will continue his posturing about the
Olympics until the next round of collective bargaining begins. Then,
when he and the owners are trying to impose an even more restrictive
salary cap on the players, Bettman will use participation in the Games
as a bargaining chip. In the meantime, it would be nice if the
parties could start sorting out next week just which of these
international competitions they would like to keep.

And, although nobody wants to say it, the 2014 Olympics' host city, Sochi, Russia, is on the border of a breakaway republic of Georgia (Abkhazia) and about a hundred to two hundred miles west or northwest of 28 different ethnic groups who don't like each other very much and tend to engage in guerrilla warfare to prove it. Chechnya, South Ossieta, Ingushetia, Dagestan, a fun little war going on between Azerbaijan and Armenia, they're all in the immediate vicinity, and Turkey and Iran are in the backyard as well, so in terms of security, even Putin's Russia has its hands full in a region that makes the worst Southwest Detroit has to throw at you look like Bloomfield Hills.

In terms of the security perspective, financial (the NHL doesn't get a dime of Olympic money), scheduling and injury risk concerns, the NHL and the NHLPA's certified agents are on the same side for once, as the Globe and Mail's Eric Duhatschek and James Mirtle found. It's not every day that deputy commissioner Bill Daly and super-player-agent Don Meehan agree, but they do agree that the World Hockey Summit, whose IIHF constituents hope to come out of the meetings with a, "We're going to have NHL'ers in the 2014 Olympics!" proclamation, will do nothing to a "sticky wicket" of a problem as goopy and gloppy as the pine tar Pavel Datsyuk slathers on his sticks:

August 21, Globe and Mail: “While we understand players seem overwhelmingly supportive of
participating in Sochi and their views will obviously be a relevant
factor in what we decide to do, there are a whole broader range of
issues and concerns that need to be considered and that too often
receive short shrift from people who want us to commit,” said NHL deputy
commissioner Bill Daly, one of seven panelists who will discuss the
Global Event Agenda at the summit on Wednesday. “We need to make
the best decision for the NHL,” Daly said. “We haven’t concluded at this
point that the best decision for all our relevant constituencies and
interests is to go.”

Participation in the Olympics also isn’t
simply an owner-v.-player issue like so many others in the game. When
Washington Capitals star Alex Ovechkin said last September he would play
in Sochi even if he faced an NHL suspension, he did so with the backing
of owner Ted Leonsis, who said he would “probably fly him over myself”
if the league decides against playing in the Games. On the
players’ side, high-profile agent Don Meehan said he can understand
where the league is coming from in terms of wanting a better arrangement
with the International Olympic Committee – and perhaps outright
compensation – in exchange for participating in the Games.

“I
don’t think the IOC in any way attempts to accommodate the league for
what it does,” Meehan said. “The league takes dictation from these
people. … [There should be] some degree of co-operation or some
assessment of value for what the league provides. And I believe there’s
none.”